When you match a street to an entity, you are answering the question: to whom or to what is this street named after?
The goal is to associate each street with a Wikidata entity whenever this is relevant.
Given the large amount of streets, we prioritise giving information about human beings starting from underrepresented groups such as women, but we welcome contributions about all entities.
If the relevant Wikidata entry does not exist:
consider adding it to Wikidata :-) - it is easy to join and contribute
you may still be able to contribute through this interface by answering a few basic questions: if this street is dedicated to a person or not, and if yes, the presumed gender of the person (typically, if no other information is known, sex assigned at birth) and the broad category you feel best applies to that individual. If you don't know, leave the relevant fields empty.
Clarifications
whenever possible, think about the origin of the street name. For example, if a street in Italy is dedicated to "25 April" (1945), it is clear that is not dedicated to a random date of the year (April 25 / Q2531), but rather to the liberation of Italy from nazi-fascism, Wikidata identifier Q112686476. Unless it is very close to the place itself, a street in Italy dedicated to "Monte Grappa" is not effectively dedicated to this rather unremarcable mountain massif, but rather to the important Battle of Monte Grappa that took place there during the first World War, Wikidata identifier Q112686476.
Other sources and options for contributing
OpenStreetMap has a dedicated field for the etymology of street names: if you have an OSM account, you can contribute easily via MapComplete (this source is currently not active used by MappingDiversity, but may be in the future).
Do consider contributing to Wikidata.
About Mapping Diversity
Mapping Diversity is a platform for discovering key facts about diversity and representation in street names across Europe, and to spark a debate about who is missing from our urban spaces.
You can explore this initiative on the dedicated website, mappingdiversity.eu. A pilot version of the project focused on Italy is also available online.
For an explanation of the technical details involved, see the post The messy data sources behind “Mapping diversity”.
About this interface
The web app you are using is called `streetnamer`. It facilitates matching street names to the person or entity a given street is dedicated to. `streetnamer` is open source; you can run it locally on your computer or deploy it customising its behaviour. It has been developed by Giorgio Comai, researcher and data analyst at OBCT/CCI, within the scope of EDJNet, the European Data Journalism Network.
The data collected through this interface have been used extensively by EDJNet. You can use them too!
Long term, it would be nice to integrate these data with Wikidata and OpenStreetMap themselves, and possibly combine them with other similar efforts, but we are still unsure about the best way to go about this, both in technical terms as well as the additional data checks that would be required. Licensing issues should also be considered (e.g. stemming from OSM's data ODbL).